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0 pointsralferoo15d ago0 comments

In the UK, all the used oil from MacDonalds is converted into biodiesel. I often walk past the plan where they do this and there's usually a lorry waiting to be allowed in through the gates.

A few years back there was some eco-warrior protest outside trying to stop the lorries going in. Not really sure what they were trying to achieve with that as it seemed counter to their aims.

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rmunn15d ago

Many eco-warrior types, not every single one but many, have... how to put this gently... not thought things all the way through. To name just one example I can think of: protesting an oil pipeline being constructed and/or extended. Well, what will happen if the pipeline doesn't go in? People will still want gasoline — protesting the pipeline isn't going to do anything about people's desire to drive their cars around — so that oil is going to get transported to the refinery somehow. If not in a pipeline, then it'll get transported by train or truck. Which will 1) burn a lot more fuel than transporting the same amount of oil through a pipeline, and 2) be more prone to accidents and oil spills (a tiny chance per truck, but that adds up fast when there are thousands of trucks per month), therefore very likely to spill more oil than the pipeline would have. In other words, blocking that pipeline is very likely to cause more ecological damage than having it built would have caused.

The eco-warrior types protesting the pipeline probably think that they're reducing the use of oil. But they haven't thought it all the way through.

acyou15d ago

While we're at it, let's think the rest of the way through, and consider the marginal effect that additional transportation cost has on price and therefore both the supply and demand side, shall we?

xp8415d ago

To prove or disprove your hypothesis, we can look at historical gas prices.

In today's dollars (adjusted for inflation) the US average gas price stayed below $2.75/gal from roughly 1986-2002. Then they broke through that barrier, only ever going below it again for two brief moments in 2016 and in 2020. Most of the time since, they've been well above $3.50, and above $4 sometimes. [1]

If you're right that demand for gasoline is highly elastic, meaning people adjust their demand in response to price, then since gas prices got much more expensive, we should expect that gas usage decreased. Have we seen this? (No. [2]) Of course we haven't, because somewhere between 63-67% of people in the US and Canada live in car-dependent suburbs.[3] These cities and towns, in addition to most rural areas, are fundamentally car-dependent and cannot function without daily car use by a majority of residents. The only way for our society to consume less gasoline would be mass electrification of private transport.

And notably, even the recent increased popularity of EVs in the post-Model-3 era isn't manifesting in the data [2] in the form of decreased consumption to my eyes. Perhaps for every new BEV out there not using gas, five people traded the cars they used to drive for inefficient, huge SUVs.

1. https://www.inflationtool.com/adjusted-prices/us-gasoline

2. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=w...

3. https://lcau.mit.edu/research/american-suburbs-project

8bitsrule14d ago

You may not have learned much about them, or thought through the potential costs of a pipeline being built through your property. Some of those 'eco-warrior types' are not protesting a pipeline, they are protesting the potential irreversable damages to their communities if a neglected or mismanaged pipeline springs a leak (and many, many have), or catches fire, or explodes. Many of them have already seen more than one result of cavalier energy company facilities that have ruined community water and food supplies. What will happen to their community if the pipeline doesn't go in? NOTHING.

SpecialistK14d ago

> What will happen to their community if the pipeline doesn't go in? NOTHING.

Or a train derailment destroying the town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...

BizarroLand14d ago

The problem that the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were protesting was not the pipelines in and of themselves, it was the running them through their reservation, and that many pipelines have had leaks, 23 from the Keystone pipeline alone.

https://apnews.com/article/keystone-oil-pipeline-leaks-spill...

They didn't want an ecological disaster in their back yard, they didn't want their religious sites disturbed, and they didn't want there to be a risk that their water ends up contaminated with oil, and the pipeline company didn't want to pay the cost to navigate around the reservation.

So of course the government stepped in and forced the protesters to accept the pipeline and now idiots that don't understand the reasoning behind the protest mock them after the fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protest...

adzm15d ago

Are you sure this isn't a strawman? The recent Dakota pipeline protests for example were very clearly about water safety and building through native burial grounds and other historic native sites. Pretty much every pipeline protest I can think of is more concerned with environmental danger of spills, not reducing oil. And a catastrophic pipeline spill can be much worse than isolated truck spills, though I'd love to know more about research on that front.

gruez15d ago

So standard NIMBY? "I think oil pipelines are great, just not in my backyard!"

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bertylicious15d ago

What is an "eco warrior"? It sounds similar to the alt-right term "social justice warrior". Is this on purpose?

ralferooOP15d ago

The term eco warrior, in the UK at least, long predates social justice warrior. As the peer reply says, it's long been applied to members of Greenpeace and I think I first heard the term in the late 80s or 90s. As they said, maybe it was because of their ship Rainbow Warrior which was sunk by the French government in 1985 and prompted Greenpeace to continue the name with future boats.

I don't think it particularly had a negative connotation until recently though, to me at least it was always just someone who had strong opinions about protecting the environment, and Greenpeace always had quite a lot of support from the general population and they weren't actively disrupting the lives of ordinary citizens in the way Just Stop Oil do for instance.

colinb15d ago

I think you have the wrong end of this stick. See the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior for an example. There have been several iterations of this ship name since the first was bombed by the French secret service in 1985.

ajb15d ago

Occasionally people in the UK get caught putting cooking oil in their (diesel ) cars, which is not illegal per se - but technically if you do it, you should pay fuel tax, which they generally don't. McDonald's are large enough that they will be, knowing that they would inevitably be caught.

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